es of
usury, bigamy, blasphemous swearing, and unnatural vice, which
appertained by right to the secular courts. It depopulated Spain by the
extermination and banishment of at least three million industrious
subjects during the first 139 years of its existence. It attacked
princes of the blood,[85] archbishops, fathers of the Tridentine
Council. It filled every city in the kingdom, the convents of the
religious, and the palaces of the nobility, with spies. The Familiars,
or lay brethren devoted to its service, lived at charges of the
communes, and debauched society by crimes of rapine, lust, and
violence.[86] Ignorant and bloodthirsty monks composed its provincial
tribunals, who, like the horrible Lucero el Tenebroso at Cordova,
paralyzed whole provinces with a veritable reign of terror.[87] Hated
and worshiped, its officers swept through the realm in the guise of
powerful _condottieri_. The Grand Inquisitor maintained a bodyguard of
fifty mounted Familiars and two hundred infantry; his subordinates were
allowed ten horsemen and fifty archers apiece. Where these black guards
appeared, city gates were opened; magistrates swore fealty to masters of
more puissance than the king; the resources of flourishing districts
were placed at their disposal. Their arbitrary acts remained
unquestioned, their mysterious sentences irreversible. Shrouded in
secrecy, amenable to no jurisdiction but their own, they reveled in the
license of irresponsible dominion. Spain gradually fell beneath the
charm of their dark fascination. A brave though cruel nation drank
delirium from the poison-cup of these vile medicine-men, whose
Moloch-worship would have disgusted cannibals.

[Footnote 85: Llorente, in his introduction to the _History of the
Inquisition_, gives a long list of illustrious Spanish victims.]

[Footnote 86: See Llorente, vol. i. p. 349, for their outrages on
women.]

[Footnote 87: For the history of Lucero's tyranny, read Llorente, vol.
i. pp. 345-353. When at last he had to be deposed, it was not to a
dungeon or the scaffold, but to his bishopric of Almeria that this
miscreant was relegated.]

Torquemada was the genius of evil who created and presided over this
foul instrument of human crime and folly. During his eighteen years of
administration, reckoning from 1480 to 1498, he sacrificed, according to
Llorente's calculation, above 114,000 victims, of whom 10,220 were
burned alive, 6,860 burned in effigy, and 97,000 condemned